Architecture-Oriented Agile Approach for Sustainability Reporting

One of the contemporary demands on large industrial organizations, and one that significantly impacts the work of engineering managers, is sustainability reporting, i.e., the process through which organizations give an account of their sustainability indicators and practices. However, gathering the necessary information to provide evidence of how an organization addresses economic, social, and environmental issues, is no simple task. Diversity of information sources, available in different formats, from different areas, by different people and for different purposes all pose challenges. Additionally, sustainability reporting is a routine demand, usually performed every year, hence a process that must be continuously improved. This work aims to address these challenges by applying an architecture-oriented agile approach to the problem. The architecture-orientation helps to determine the necessary requirements to be met and establishes a baseline from which to improve the process by linking the necessary information to its sources (e.g., processes, areas, departments, people, information systems, and suppliers). The agile approach helps to define incremental improvements according to organizational priorities, focusing on having, at all moments, and actionable process. A case study of an organization—automobile industry—that publishes a sustainability report according to the Standards of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) is shown to illustrate the approach and provide insights on how it assists in improving this process.